Culture and Ethnicity

Recently I have seen been fair amount of discussion of issues having to do with race relations, Islamist violence, and Israel and Jews. There were the highly publicized police killings of black people last year, followed by discussions of white privilege. There have been the actions of ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Qaeda. There have been the murderous attacks by Muslims on journalists and Jews in France and Denmark. In response to these and other events there was the PEGIDA movement in Germany, opposing Muslim immigration into Europe. There have been long-standing nationalist movements in various countries of Europe. Some people caution against Islamophobia. Others see a rise in anti-Semitism. Still others say that the Jews control events to a significant extent. Some people support multiculturalism. Some call for separation.


My Basic Position.  I see all this in the light of my Christianity, which tells me the the human race is essentially one, and that what is most important is the spread of the gospel, which tells us to love one another. That said, I recognize that within the one human race there are various ethnicities. I also recognize that different people have developed different cultures, some of which have seemed to incorporate the teachings of the gospel better than others, and some of which have produces higher levels of material comfort than others. Thus far in human history, it seems to me that Western civilization has done best in these regards.

On the other hand, there is a definite distinction between civilization and culture, on the one hand, and ethnicity on the other. There is nothing about Western civilization that makes it inaccessible to people of ethnicities other than European. For example, Japan is gradually adopting aspects of Western civilization and culture, and has been doing so since the 19th Century. And, by the same token, there is nothing about Western ethnicities that guarantees that they will always remain bearers of Western civilization. The peoples of the West are slowly abandoning the values of the civilization which developed among them. For me, the Judeo-Christian Western civilization is far more important than the ethnicity of its current bearers.

When I speak of the West, I mean Europe, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries whose culture is largely comparable to those I've mentioned. By Western civilization, I mean the civilization and cultures which developed in Europe under the influence of the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome and of Christianity and were spread since 1492 to the other regions that are now part of the West.


Contemporary Problems. The issues I mentioned at the outset present problems for Western civilization.

Muslim Extremism. It seems that most Muslims, both in the West and elsewhere, have been for some time and still are willing to live in peace with non-Muslims. It might have seemed to most observers that the era of Muslim expansionism by military means had come to an end. Within the post quarter century or so,* however, elements within the Muslim world have expressed increasing hostility to the West and have turned to violence against Western targets, both with Muslim countries and beyond. It should be noted, however, that the violence is not solely against non-Muslims. Many Muslim extremists also commit violence against Muslims whom they regard as heretics. Indeed, it is probable that many more Muslims than non-Muslims have been victims of Muslim extremists.

*Perhaps the first example of this violent hostility goes back a little farther, to the seizing of the U.S. embassy in Tehran when the Shah was overthrown, and the characterization of the United States as "the great Satan."

Multiculturalism. When I was growing up, the image we had of the United States was of a "melting pot," which would absorb people of various ethnicities and cultures and blend them into a single people with a single culture. The assumption was that the resulting culture would be basically Western. Now the notion of multiculturalism has replaced the paradigm of the melting pot with the paradigm of the salad or the mosaic, in which each ingredient or element remains unchanged, unassimilated, but the result is something better than the sum of its parts. It is part of a relativism which says not only that "all men are created equal," but that nothing any of them develop is superior to what others develop, and no ideas or beliefs are better than any others. Not only must we respect others, we must never make judgments about the validity of anything they say.

Where assimilation would tend to the creation of a common culture, multiculturalism prevents it and assures that different groups continue to see themselves as disconnected from the larger society within which they live. Thus, for example, multiculturalism provide the ground in which Muslim extremism can more easily grow among Muslims in the West.

Race Relations.  At one time many European countries were ethnically very homogeneous — although with  variations depending on their history of settlement and conquest. For example, England was ethnically more diverse — with its Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Norse, and Norman French elements — than Denmark or Lithuania. In the Americas, there has always been more tunic diversity. There were the aborigines, the European settlers, and the Africans, with considerable numbers of Asians added more recently. Ethnic purity has never been a reality, although the degree of intermarriage has varies, with a greater level in Latin America. In the United States, despite some degree of intermarriage, it has remained possible for most people to self-identify and identify others as White, Black, Native American, or, more recently, Hispanic — although the univocal identification could ignore the fact that in some cases the ethnicity was merely predominant.

White prejudice against non-Whites, punctuated by segregation and by KuKlux Klan terrorism, has contributed to Black feelings of estrangement from White people and to the growth of a culture of contempt for White people. Mutual suspicion has grown, to the point that Black people are often viewed with suspicion and fear by White people. Thus the experience of being stopped by police for "driving while black" is considered to be commonplace, and Black parents consider their sons to be in such heightened danger of violence at the hands of police officer that many try to teach them how to avoid saying or doing anything which could provoke a police officer. By contrast, White people do not assume that they are likely to be stopped when they are not violating the law or behaving suspiciously,nor do they take it for granted that any encounter of their sons with police contains a high risk of violence being inflicted on those sons. In short, White people fear Blacks, Blacks fear the police, and the police fear Blacks.

It may well be that 100 years ago, Black people felt themselves part of the predominant culture of the United States, and that ongoing prejudice and segregation,legal or informal, has led to current feelings of alienation, which have fostered the rise of Islam, as well as the distinctive ghetto culture. The delight most Black people seemed to take in the acquittal of O.J. Simpson seems to have had a large element of  pleasure in "sticking it to the man," as well as a measure of belief that the system was railroading him because he was Black.

Despite the fact that Spaniards and Portuguese are European, most non-Hispanics in the United States seem to think of Hispanics in general as non-White.

Since the ethnicities in the United States are irretrievably mixed, racial purity is an impossibility, even though some fantasize it. Instead, the problem is to achieve a rapprochement among those who are more or less White, Black, Hispanic, and Native, so that we can all be bearers of the Western civilization to which we are heirs as a nation, and live without endemic suspicion, fear, hostility, and contempt.


To be continued.

I wrote the above almost a week ago, with the intention of saying more about the problems I've outlined in the light of my basic position. But since I haven't got around to it yet, I'm publishing this part for your consideration and comments. Hopefully, I will write more on the subject soon.